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Cutting through

So when our turn came to go out to the nets, with the dummy charges one on each side, I felt happy to be undertaking a full-scale trial under something like operational conditions. As we were proceeding towards the net area, I more or less dressed myself in the ungainly diver suit, with occasional help from Buck, such as putting on the tight wristbands; they required someone else’s two hands to stretch them and slip them over the diver's wrists. By the time we dived for our approach, I was in the wet-and-dry, putting myself on oxygen, from the bottles slung on my back.

The X-craft nudged into the net, but I felt nothing. Buck gave the signal, I okayed back with my thumb, and he shut the glass, then the steel hatch parting me from the control room. Two thumps exchanged, and the pump started. As water swirled up around my calves, I realised that I had forgotten to check with Buck how deep we were. As it rose higher, I vented from my headpiece as best I could. The pump motor laboured, and stopped. There was water right up to the main hatch; I felt it with my hand, then pressed on the stud to equalise the last few pounds of pressure. I pressed and kept trying the main hatch, leaving the lever in the open position. It seemed that I had been pressing for much longer than on the previous occasion. Perhaps the pump had laboured because something was wrong?
Suddenly the main hatch lifted, and I eased my body into position for rising. With my torso half out, I held myself by the knees within the compartment and vented. There was much less light than I was accustomed to, for daytime. I glanced up, and saw with a spasm of anxiety how far underwater we were. The buoys were quite out of sight, and the state of the net showed that Buck had taken it much deeper to avoid hitting a hole again. Around me there was no evidence of any cuts.
Once clear of the hatch, and horizontal, the power of the tide bore me swiftly aft. I grabbed hold of the periscope standard just in time to stop myself being swept over the stern portion. When I turned to face forward again, the tidal pressure on the upper part of my breathing bag half emptied it; I had to guff up more than usual so as to maintain enough O2 to work with. I opened the cutter box in the casing, and took it out, checking that the lead of the cable was clear for extension to the bows of the craft.
All this I had to do one-handed, for the other hand had become a claw to grapple me on to the casing, two fingers inserted into one of the holes that punctured it at intervals of a few inches. Hugging the cutter to my side, I then hauled myself slowly and laboriously forward, against the tide. It was heavy work, and I had to drag myself far enough each time to make sure that I could guff up with my free hand (the other was holding the large cutter) before slipping back to the same point on the casing as I had just been at. Gradually I managed to develop a technique of shouldering the tide in such a way that I could haul two or three times between having to guff up, and found myself at the bows of X8, surveying the wires to be cut, in the right order.

The cutter responded well, but I found myself being swept against the net by the force of water at my back: cutting was always done facing the craft. Two cuts were done, and now I selected the spot for the final cut that would - or should - let the craft through. I glanced aft, and tried to estimate how much fatter the sides might have become now that the charges were mounted. There was no way of telling but to try. I opened the valve: the cutters bit through.

At once the X-craft pushed ahead, snagged for moment on some protuberance, then drove ahead again. She was more than half way past me, and I was down where her sides were smooth. I was sinking, holding the weight of the cutter, out of reach; she was passing me. I grabbed the cutter cable, let the cutters drop into the depths below, and held on, then pulled myself gradually up to the midget sub again, each haul a mighty heave, guffing up desperately against the tide and now the speed of the craft too. For we were sweeping ahead, and it was getting darker. Buck was taking her down, even deeper! The spectre of O2 poisoning loomed up: I had been exerting myself greatly at depths well below the safety level of thirty feet.

I made it finally to the casing. and hooked myself on, well aft of the periscope standard. The effort had been prodigious. We were still deep, and moving faster underwater than I had ever experienced. I found breathing difficult, and clung on, feeling my field of consciousness rapidly dwindle. For a moment or two I must have blacked out, for I came to with a start, panicked at the realisation that I had lost consciousness, and guffed desperately so as to gain enough O2 to make it back to the wet-and-dry. The cutters were forgotten, trailing somewhere below the X-craft. Very slowly I struggled back to the hatch. To have the lever in my hand was reassuring; as I slid into the opening, I noticed there was more light around me, and the water pressure against my body and bag was less. I shut the hatch over my head, and in the darkness thumped twice. The compartment emptied, and I heard the slap of waves on the casing. We were on the surface. The control room hatches opened.

Buck looked worried. 'You all right, Lefty?'
'Yeah ... but I had to leave the cutters unstowed.'
'What! Where are they then?'
'Hanging on the end of the cable, below.'
'What the hell did you do that for?'
'I had to get back inboard ... I blacked out, hanging on to the casing.'
'You blacked out?'
‘Yeah ... the pressure of the water. Then you increased speed, and went deep. I could scarcely hold on — kept having to guff up to get enough O2.'
Buck looked shaken. 'I don't like the sound of that at all ... Not at all.'
Nor did I. I had only come near blacking out once before, when I got lip twitch at seventy-five feet in Portsmouth harbour. But this time, for a couple of seconds - or perhaps more - I had been 'out'. If I hadn't been hooked on with my fingers, I would have been swept off, and might now be at the bed of the loch, and dying or dead. Or I might, if I had had positive buoyancy at that moment, have floated up to the surface; probably then I would have come to, and been able to swim for the shore. But if that happened on an operation, the X-craft would have lost its diver, one way or another, and the operation endangered.

Buck took the craft to a sheltered spot, then got out on the casing and hauled in the cutter, stowing it in the locker provided. Luckily it was undamaged; it had not fouled or struck any rocks underwater as it trailed along in the depths of Loch Cairnbawn. But it might have done, I reflected.

As we went back to Bonaventure on main engines, there was a gloomy atmosphere aboard; and I was the cause. Or mostly. Yet we shouldn't have had to go through at fifty feet; and presumably the trim hadn't been right, if the craft had had to increase speed so much after going through to overcome dropping down even deeper. I worked out that we must have gone down to seventy, maybe ninety feet, as I was clambering up the cable and holding on grimly, struggling for breath.

I felt bad about this exercise. I had suddenly and unexpectedly lost confidence in myself, and realised I did not really know how to manage the cutters underwater against a strong tide or current. New techniques of holding and movement were needed, and special vigilance at the moment when the final cut was made. For the power of the X-craft to push ahead underwater seemed greater than the diver's ability to survive underwater when holding on. What were the limits to be observed? And what should the drill be for handling the cutters and so make sure that they could be stowed smartly after use, while still underwater? I think I was one of the first divers to take an X-craft through the nets. Naturally I told the others what had happened, and they cast me anxious glances, more out of concern for themselves than for me. But my hopes of getting another go on the nets were never realised. There was just too tight a schedule of other things to get done.

The X5 plan

Frequently I could only form a hazy idea of what these were, though I tried to piece some of it together by listening to Buck, Jack Marsden and Jack Smart, the passage crew commander. Together with a Petty Officer called Pomeroy and a leading stoker called Robinson, Jack Smart - a lieutenant in the RNVR - was to take X8 from Loch Cairnbawn to the dropping zone that lay off the north Norwegian coast, and then swop places with the operational crew, by means of a rubber dinghy attached to a line from the towing submarine. For all the days of the passage therefore, Jack Smart would be in charge, and had therefore to have as much knowledge about X-craft as Buck. So the team of people working on X8 really numbered seven, with me the least useful member. Jack was from Durham, and so he and I had something in common, both of us coming from the north-east. But I still felt very much the extra hand, not wholly part of the team.
Around this time we started to be visited by various people with special functions in the war. We were issued with specially warm clothing lined with kapok, to protect us against the cold of being submerged in arctic waters for days on end. I took to wearing that article a good deal, thinking it gave me a jaunty air. That was something I strove to cultivate, partly to disguise the increasing fears inside me that I was one of those who would not be coming back. The nonchalant look was my chosen image, and some were perhaps taken in by it, even amongst the divers. Jo Harding came up to me, and quietly introduced the subject of danger, and risk, and so worked round to telling me, as we leaned on the guardrail and looked over to the bluff opposite, that he was sleeping badly and waking up scared, fearful that he mightn't be returning from the operation. I told him that I thought most of us had those thoughts from time to time, and that there was no need to pay any special attention to them; I treated the matter in a rather blasé manner, and he seemed to be somewhat reassured, drawing upon my own apparent lack of fear about the outcome. As I felt him drawing strength from me, I felt weaker myself, and knew that I now had less in my own resource of courage to draw on.

Geordie Nelson, X5's diver, then came to talk with, me. I had known that Henty-Creer had a madcap streak in him: a finely-tuned eccentric. I assumed that it was his ambiguous intensity that his crew members found hard to live with. But it was more than his character that induced their sense of strain: it was the scheme he had evolved for X5's attack on the Tirpitz. Geordie told me about it, against Henty-Creer's instructions. The envisaged mode of attack was perhaps only also known to Cameron and Place, since they had been given the same target as X5. Yet even they may not have been taken into Henty-Creer’s confidence.
'Come ower here, man, I want to taak with ye,' Geordie said to me one day. We walked to a quiet spot on the guardrail, up in the bows of the ship. 'Now ye knaa yon Henty-Creer's a daft bugger. Wiel, he wants tae attack the Tirpitz in his ain way, like ...' Geordie looked about him to make sure we weren't being overheard. 'Noo he doesna want me to say what it's gannin tae be, but I'm tellin’ ye aal the seim, 'cos it gies the diver a special job tae dae.'
I looked him quickly: what could Geordie mean? Our job was to get the X-craft through the nets: both getting in, and what was worse, getting clear again once the charges had been laid on the seabed under the target; for if the craft got caught in the nets and couldn't get clear before the charges exploded, great damage would be done to the midget, and she might find it hard to surface for long enough to let her crew get out. The diver, however, if still on the nets, would have his guts blown out and die instantly. So what could the special job be that Henty-Creer had in mind?

Geordie explained. It was an incredible idea, fully in line with Henty-Creer's bizarre fancy. Instead of laying the charges on the seabed under Tirpitz, he would attach them directly under the ship's counter, using ropes to lash them on to each of the propeller shafts, or else to one of the blades on the great screw, near the rudder. In this way, he argued, far greater explosive effect could be gained. And it was to be Geordie's task, as diver, to make the charges fast under the battleship. Henty-Creer had asked Geordie whether it could be done, and if so whether he would be prepared to do it. It was up to Geordie to decide.

And now Geordie was asking me what I thought; more than that, what I would do if I were he. My skin ran goose-pimples, and my heart pumped furiously. At once I imagined the diver there in the half light under the stern - Geordie, me - wrestling with ropes and the awkwardly shaped charges, trying to manoeuvre their great bulk up close to the propeller shaft, while the X-craft lay nearby, waiting to ease the other charge out from the hull. It might just be done: but it would require positive buoyancy, just a little in each charge, instead of the negative buoyancy with which they were fitted to take them to the bottom. But not too much, or they would start slithering up under the ship’s counter, gathering speed, and then break surface like a couple of walruses.

My heart still beating fast, I went through the moves under the battleship with Geordie, each of us checking the tactics to be adopted to get the charges in place. We combed through the sequences again for snags, and found solutions, the best solutions we could think of. There was no doubt in our minds, finally: it would call for a close understanding between skipper and diver, including a set of signals passed underwater through and by the fixed periscope. And it would require a lot of luck. But it could just work.

So I told Geordie. I even began, if I remember rightly, talking with him about doing the same under the Lützow. But he would at once have pointed out that if I did so, Henty-Creer would realise at once that I had heard of his scheme through his own diver. Geordie had spoken to me in confidence. Let it remain like that. He faced me then, and took my hand.
'Thanks, Lefty.'
We both knew how much was at stake.

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